Learner Therapist (57) … Retraumatising forever!

Torrey Orton
March 24, 2015

When the family makes a late, uninvited and seemingly unavoidable return…

There are many things about trauma which are difficult to understand, both for the traumatised and their friends and colleagues. High among the list is re-traumatising within the family, or other social system(s) of origin (e.g.-schools, clubs, churches…). Poor relationship choices are almost unavoidable, at least the first times around. These choices arise from inappropriate relationship needs shaped by the original abuses.

Maybe you wouldn’t have heard the one about the parents who had to call on their children for rescue from their everyday self-management incompetence? Or the one about the parents whose most abused male child bought them a new house after they lost the family home and then they lost it again, having never acknowledged the gift before losing it? But the parents who refuse to stay away are another thing. Here’s such a story.

The two children have long before moved to a distance beyond daily or weekly visits to or from their parents…both at times to other sides of the globe. One finds himself back in the monthly visit range with Father and weekly with Mother, while himself in the early stages of child raising and attempting to integrate family and continuing work demands with a rigorously perfectionist self-assessment system in place. It’s one of the unintended consequences of his parents’ respective withholdings of affection and engagement with him 35 years ago, amplified by conflicting gender role expectations arising from their southern European origins. Now, Mother can’t resist commenting on child rearing practices and behaving in ways which replay almost verbatim to his children the treatment she dished out 35 years before to him.

Dad has kept himself to the old family town more than a day away and retired with such bad effect that he’s lost all of his retirement funds except a vaguely commercial property in said town. He’s acquiring a new wife and the prospect of a sale of the property, but with no commercial nous that would ensure he doesn’t lose it all again. He, like Mother, keeps number two child, a daughter a few years younger than son, appraised of the collapse of his financial worlds. This sharing elicits without soliciting (and so all the more powerfully demanding) a financial sympathy which slides into a felt obligation to help. This sense is then imposed on the son with blind complicity by number two’s intermediation of the messages about the parental decomposition.

This would not be too much if the children were rich and calmly located in the upper end of their parenting cycles, but they are not. And the implied burden of the assistance they should provide is unequally spread, too. Because number two lives in another country she can’t remotely be expected to house Mother as she slides towards a physical infirmity paralleling her financial one. And note that this pattern of implied obligation, openly but indirectly (through Number Two) proposed, also repeats the pattern of indirect expectations the children had been subjected to in their childhood!!

Abuse creates guilt in the abused, almost without exception (and completely beyond the understanding or appreciation of the ‘normal’). The re-traumatised, as Number One and Two are, get to revisit the experience of guilt when their incompetent parents reappear with more or less explicit pleas for family succour and without acknowledgment of the abuse which created the original guilt. The children now have the guilt of their desire not to succour the incompetent and abusing, which Number One has made a professional life around as policeman, and similar occupations!!

 

Learner therapist (39)…… Boundaries and borders in and of therapy

Torrey Orton

Oct. 4, 2013

Work in progress…the contributions of social media

 

I’m going to a workshop entitled “Boundaries, borders and multiplicities: ethics and professionalism for psychologists with emphasis on social media” on October 16^th, ‘13. So I thought I’d think about it a bit first since I know some of my practice is a bit borderline – or, maybe unbounded? - for some. In fact, I think I work the borders with persistence and urgency – the borders of feelings, of spaces, of intentions, of understandings, of behaviours, of roles…all the places where patients arrive in therapy unproductively self-constrained!! The social media provide new opportunities for boundary stretching and/or unintended crossings! My point here is not to argue the role of social media but first assay the field of boundaries, among which it is a relatively new one.

 

So, let’s start with a definition of boundaries and borders (with frontiers on the sidelines). I think they are still fitting for a virtual world. That is, social media can be partly described and engaged using these three concepts – boundary, border and frontier – with the emphasis on the last of the three.

Boundary, border, frontier share the sense of that which divides one entity or political unit from another.

Boundary in reference to a country, city, state, territory, or the like, most often designates a line on a map: boundaries are shown in red….

Border is more often used than boundary in direct reference to a political dividing line; it may also refer to the region (of, for instance, a country) adjoining the actual line of demarcation: crossing the Mexican border; border towns along the Rio Grande.

Frontier may refer to a political dividing line: crossed the Spanish frontier on Tuesday. It may also denote or describe the portion of a country adjoining its border with another country ( towns in the Polish frontier ) or ….the most remote settled or occupied parts of a country: the frontier towns of the Great Plains. Frontier especially in the plural, also refers to the most advanced or newest activities in an area of knowledge or practice: the frontiers of nuclear medicine

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/boundary

My professional organisation (the APS) proposes the following cautions about boundaries. Interestingly, the concept of frontier is not included, maybe because it is implied in the concept of “boundary crossings”. And with that observation it immediately becomes apparent that the relationship between boundaries/borders and frontiers is systemically conflicting.

Here’s what the APS ethics rules say -

1.3. A distinction is frequently made between boundary crossings and boundary violations. Crossings are

departures from commonly accepted practice that some psychologists may see as appropriate, for example

attending a client’s special event. It is acknowledged that both cultural background and theoretical orientation

will influence how psychologists and their clients construe certain behaviours. Nevertheless, given that such

blurring of boundaries is often a precursor to later major transgressions, it is important for the psychologist

to examine the implications of such actions, no matter how innocuous they seem at the time. Boundary

violations will be referred to in Section 3.

 

1.4. In practice, major boundary violations are frequently preceded by lack of attention to minor boundary

crossings. The process of boundaries gradually eroding is sometimes referred to as the ‘slippery slope’

phenomenon, (Barnett, Lazarus, Vasquez, Moorehead-Slaughter, & Johnson 2007; Gabbard, 1996; Gutheil,

1989). For example, in circumstances where psychologists significantly alter their standard practice to

accommodate the ‘needs’ of their clients, psychologists consider the following questions to help clarify

whether there are potential boundary crossings emerging.

• Am I operating within my limits of competence?

• Am I avoiding any topics?

• Am I showing any uncharacteristic behaviours?

• Do I have discomfort with boundaries?

• Am I self-disclosing more than usual?

• Am I taking into account any current personal difficulties?

• Is there a possibility of a conflict of interest developing?

Professional boundaries and multiple relationships © The Australian Psychological Society Limited 2008

Event boundaries of therapy are the field of my practice – I work in two shared offices (with financial and other patient management services provided) and a home office (I provide all patient management services). In addition under those rubrics for patient management purposes, I have used non-typical locations: in a car, in a cafe, in a park, walking the street together. These occur when, e.g., a shared office is closed unexpectedly by alarm system failures, locked doors or patient preference for variety.

Social media are woven into my practice – but NOT Facebook and Twitter - e.g. email (did supervision and therapy by email), SMS (set and change appointments, take homework reports) phone (same management matters and some therapy), and Skype (therapy and catch-ups overseas) in order from least to most intimate. I wave goodbye to Skype partners at closing of sessions!!! …and sometimes hello, too!

The standard therapeutic hour has at least these three major segments with barely visible boundaries between them. They come into view when a patient has trouble negotiating them. Entry and exit seem most perilous perhaps because they require explicit agency from patients, which is often what they are in the room for in the first place.

a.      Entry to office and to room

b.     Working and the setting in room – distance between chairs, size of total space, lighting, heating, contents, etc.

c.      Exit from room/office

Physical boundaries – the edges of our bodies and places and furnishings / designs.

For instance, a patient who came and stayed for 6 months twice a week at his own expense, noted after the first or second session that he had been strongly discouraged from making ANY physical contact with patients (he’s a psych in training) prompted by the fact I always shook his hand on the way in and on the way out of every session. It clearly did not trouble him, but he had been given the impression that it was a handhold too far for my academic colleagues. None of my many practice colleagues who I have worked with for the last five years has ever expressed a worry, nor has a patient. Nor is it mentioned for forbidding in the above Professional boundaries and multiple relationships, though it may be implied in discussion of other hands-on therapeutic techniques elsewhere in the APS ethics.

Intellectual boundaries

I leak from therapy competences into other life competences. For instance, when I bring therapeutic perspectives and processes into many work settings as an executive coach. And I leak in the reverse direction as a result of having a grip on organisation and group theory and practice (as worker, manager and principal of professional practices), which allows extension of individual therapeutic work into the spheres of public and private action which range from family to team to organisation in a range of industries.

Social boundaries

Managing social boundaries like gender, age, class, education, culture (and the respective cultural variants of each of these factors) I do fairly well across at least European and Confucian cultures, with some capacity in East African and Middle Eastern ones. I have lived as an adult in the US, France, China and Australia.

Emotional boundaries – displaying  / expressing any of the core emotions – joy, sadness, anger, shame, fear, surprise,  interest, disgust – which occupies a large part of my focus in session, both as mine affect patients and as theirs affect them and me. I attend to how they are expressed, which I point out to patients often and early to anchor their level of self-awareness and control in our relationship.

Lifecycle / developmental boundaries enforced by aging to some extent socio-economic factors  – mentioning these is often a useful frame to patients stuck in a swirl of factors leaving them pitching in a sea of emotions without a shore in sight.

Institutional boundaries – family, school, club, work, church, state, nation….often interacting with the lifecycle/developmental ones since the institutions often sit astride the entries and exits of developmental stages. They are rites and rights of passage.

And, there are roles and hence role boundaries like therapist, teacher, instructor, parent, - I understand myself to be shifting around these roles, with therapist as the dominant one even if at times not at all the prominent role of the moment. I consciously mark my transitions between them most of the time, showing that I have the dependence / independence / interdependence triad largely in hand in session.

Finally, the thing about boundaries is they never (?) come in ones. Like people, they come in multiples, which is maybe what the workshop title is hinting at. e.g. – restorative justice and trauma therapy are conducted by processes somewhat similar in steps and goals, but emerging from opposite ends of the practice spectra. Restorative justice is a socio-legal prescription for a personal, socially imposed, hurt. Therapy provides the setting for embracing the right to that justice.

The world of therapy is always complex in many ways, and social media is just another way, not THE one that techonauts blindly promote. In the therapy place, wherever and whichever it is, all is in play face-to-face with mutually examinable settings for each player as needed. The ‘mutually desirable’ bit is what therapy models and provides the opportunity and experience to achieve in the everyday world.

 

 

Learning to act right (36)… When we need someone to do it for us!!

Torrey Orton

July 28, 2013

“He’ll have the bubbly red, too”

 

The other day I was out for a lunch bite with Mike. When he’s lunching at the University Café he takes a glass of bubbly red with it. I seldom drink midday, midweek unless on the road as in the Brasserie du Commerce in Besancon two months ago. This time, however, I was free after lunch so I started contemplating a glass myself and got hung up between a house shiraz and the aforesaid bubbly red, which I did not know other than by the repute his use of it lent. The waiter was standing there and I was uhming and awing.

 

My decision was all that stood between us and lunch starting its trip from the kitchen and I couldn’t make it. I was stuck in the roundabout of indeterminable differences between the options, pedalling and still.

 

“He’ll have the bubbly red, too”…

 

… Mike said and I settled in relief, as did the waiter. A classic of the situation where any decision is OK, if someone would just make one. I so much needed help at the moment that I didn’t know it until he provided it decisively. Either would be good for me if I could make the move. Thanks to Mike I was moved. It was an ethically vacuous event, but clear in its agency. I submitted to the push of his action, and needed to do so if the rest of the event was to unfold.

 

It occurred to me at the time that this was also a major purpose of close relationships – to share the decision load of life as much as the consequential work. And sharing is sometimes to pick up the bundle unasked…which requires a slightly daring arrogation of rights to oneself in the interest of preserving the participation of the other in the shared load!!!

 

There are two things in joint decision making (which seldom means both coming to the same conclusion simultaneously). It must be right in content and in process: we have to come to decisions in acceptable ways - consultatively, considerately, flexibly…and, we have to make the right decision for the task in question. The process is more important than the product since specific decisions can often be changed modified, adapted (usually do if they are substantive ones) and that requires effective consultation. These are mostly engineering problems, problems of having right tools and flexible application rules. The decision, however, is pure art - intuitive, scatty, quick – in need of a spark and failing the internal one, an outer will do fine. Someone has to move, and a hand is sometimes required.

 

Let’s run that by again in story form

 

Two months ago now I had been stuck in a decision muddle for weeks about taking a week to go to the US for a family reunion, or not to. I really was stuck in thinking which was dangling in the branches of multiple considerations of sentiment and logistics until I visited a now dead friend, Barry, who was clearly on the way to dying in his own mind at the time. I stopped by the palliative care place he had recently been consigned to and shared my small concern. “Do it”, he said almost before I got my considerations shaped up for him. His own brother, long separated, somewhat estranged, had just been down from another state to see him and they had talked for the first time in years. He was clear about the relationship priorities of late life. I could feel my mind slip over a cog as he spoke and walked out with uncluttered resolve to go (which I will be doing in two weeks).

 

 

Learning to act right (34)… “Gloves are off”

Torrey Orton
June 1, 2013

 

“Gloves are off” usually signals engaging with more force, preparing for a fight of some kind, having it out. There’s another usage, at least in my life, which is perhaps equally automatic as this one, but does not enjoy its linguistic popularity. This ungloved hand is a foundation of right action.

 Right action is founded in civility in part, and civility in politenesses, and politenesses in human history, perhaps some even back to our pre-historic precursors. Among these, manners of greeting are central and mostly pass by without notice because they are automatic at the beginning and ending of events. The arrival of Melbourne’s version of winter (8C early mornings) is glove country for me. I show up around 7am at my twice weekly morning post in front of the Fertility Control Clinic to be greeted eventually by the security guard of the day. On his walking down the Clinic path I unglove my right hand with my left and offer the bare paw to him.

 

Originally, on the first such morning, he declared my ungloving unnecessary. I had to explain that it just is not right to shake a man’s hand (or any other’s, child or adult for that matter!) with a glove on. I couldn’t explain why. He had not grown up in a winter gloved  place, so it was a wonder to him, and no one on the street who I’ve chased it up with has had an idea either why it is the right thing to do.

 

My point here is not really the historical origins of my sense but rather that I have it automatically functioning, as it always has. It belongs with a number of other politenesses (public ones, especially) which arise out of me under appropriate circumstances. The most recent was standing back for others to enter a lift first. Given that I’m usually undeniably the oldest person standing wherever it is, there’s some natural deference I elicit in my efforts to honour others. A small tussle sometimes ensues of the variety specific to efforts at mutual respect which can only be resolved by one deferring to the other’s need by accepting their respect. I usually stand on my right to be respectful over theirs, but will accede to a repeatedly pled need.

 

Such habits can be changed, with serious, persistent application. For instance, I can deliver a good Chinese handshake now after a few years practice. This is seriously counter-intuitive to westerners, particularly Anglo ones, who treat any close contact between men (other than jocks in the full spiritual frenzy of sport) as suggesting sexual intent. For Chinese, length of handshake and intensity, nicely balanced and certainly not paw crushing, is a signal of presence and likely eventual persistence. Good starting places for any connection.

 

There are some other own cultural fine points: right hand only and shaking all the present hands being preferred, even if they are the paws of knowable unknowns – friends of friends; colleagues of colleague. I walked into a psych workshop a week ago and was greeted by the sponsor’s president who I’ve known professionally but distantly for 10 years. I had a coat, a backpack and the day’s course ware in my right arm/hand and offered my left to him as I moved by to let others in.  A few hours later at the midmorning break I stopped by at his table first to re-offer the shake right handed. I just had to on the way to asking a question about other matters.

 

A neuroscience influenced thinker might point out that these are behaviours intended to “down regulate” the amygdala’s wariness about anything new. I’m not sure this adds too much other than to  the accessibility of the concept of the amygdala’s function. I don’t doubt it is true, nor that an appearance of civil intent can be presented which is also keeping under cover some degree of apprehension about the other.

 

A few weeks earlier I had stopped into a local restaurant in Albert Park to pass on a long-delayed message from an industry old-timer I had seen months earlier in another place. The boss was in, as were his main 2ICs. I held out my hand to the boss and reported the message with appropriate disclaimers for my lateness in doing so. I was in a rush for some reason and went out immediately only to be stopped in my tracks 100 meters away by noticing that I had insulted the 2ICs. It’s a nice question what prompted the awareness but the proximate trigger was a video replay of the just gone event in which I notice the missing handshakes for the 2ICs!!!

 

The explanation, I imagine, is a subliminal function which checks experience against templates for right action. I turned around in the middle of my stopped tracks, retraced my steps, asked the boss to get the 2ICs back (one of whom was in the upstairs storage area of the restaurant), shook their hands and explained my need to do so, which they persistently assured me was not required nor even noticed by them. The latter point I wondered about but couldn’t stop to explore. It could have been impolite to do so – disrespectful of their explicit self-knowledges of not needing my paw then!!

 

I wonder if these behaviours can be picked up in an fMRI “light up”, or any other of its kind.

Learner therapist (22)……Telling people what they “need” to hear

Learner therapist (22)……Telling people what they "need" to hear
Torrey Orton
Sept. 9, 2012

"What you need to do is…"

A friend challenged me a while back with the proposition that "you can't tell someone something they don't want to hear". So I started on the spot (at the time in an Art Nouveau café/bistro frequented by Collette in Besancon, France in the early 1900's) to demonstrate how I could do that. My first move was to contradict her assertion, which got her attention, so to speak…the rest I want to explore somewhat more systematically as an approach to patient education / awareness in therapy.
The methods / techniques of confronting must vary with the vulnerability of the patient, the therapist and the present state of the therapy relationship. The principle form of variation is the intensity of the truth claim made for the conflicting opinion on offer from the therapist. Truth intensity is expressed, apart from non-verbal components (volume, pace, gesture) by choice of modal verbs – could, should, must, might – and the level of truth claim: e.g. I guess, I suppose, I imagine, I believe, I'm sure, it is the case that, and so on…ascending to scriptural or other canonical claims of irrefutability.
Variable vulnerabilities
These variations are the 'how' of telling someone what they do (may!) not want to hear and are more important than the 'what'. The what provides the conscious motive for taking action. There are three easily assessed and communicated whats: (a) a patient's emotional misalignment with their present concerns, (b) a misapprehension of what's happening – the facts, and (c) inappropriate beliefs or values for dealing with their concerns about what's happening.
On the whole, the success of any effort to tell somebody something against their immediate sense of need for an offer will fail, no matter how relevant, shapely, timely the offered information is. This is because the offer has to be perceived as an offer of help; that is, as arising from the therapist's positive intent towards the patient. This is the primary motivation of an offer, not the 'what'. If positive intent is in short supply or at the time not in view, then the patient will perceive the offer as a preface to a manipulation and back off as much as they can.
Don't ease in
This fact is the background to the idea that a difficult conversation can never be "eased into" successfully. The effort to ease in will be perceived as what it is – not the real message, just making small talk when big talk is expected and necessary. Rather, the patient will perceive a cover-up, a deception, occurring. Therein lies the undisclosed vulnerability of the easing-in therapist, signalling the therapist's doubt about containing the consequences of the confrontation. Doubt is what patients already have plenty of themselves.
The overall aim of therapy I understand to be the building of a conversation which is a normal, effective adult conversation with appropriate turn-taking, etc. I give patients various kinds of evidence which they can use to test whether they are getting better, and to mark eventually that they are finished with our work. One kind of evidence has to do with jointly conducting the agenda and process of our therapeutic conversations.
A simple, learnable system for effective therapeutic conversation is the three step chunking device of Entry, Action and Close with Checking for effectiveness at each step along the way. This system is a means of engaging any kind of actually or probably or possibly conflictful context. For example, see The Negotiator (1998) for an extended example of walking along the fringe of violence without either denying its possibility or falling into it (a fantasy we may have about all perceived conflicts). Every time one side or the other picks up the phone to initiate a call a new entry has to be created by the person calling. This is often pro-forma, but if matters are emotionally dense, for whatever reasons, some attention must be paid to details like acknowledging the existing feelings.
The whats of therapy
Back to the whats mentioned earlier. I'm going to focus on confronting patients about (a) their personal (in)congruence, (b) their (mis)understanding of "the facts" and (c) the beliefs (including values) through which they interpret the world. These are the 'what' of confronting, the reasons I would want to confront a patient – that they do not know what they feel, that they do not have the facts in hand and/or that they hold incorrect beliefs about the world (and so miss some of the facts).
The system in brief – a short example
This example will show a different what in action in each step and the movement from one step to another through engaging the whats of the discussion. This is merely a sketch. Each chunk might take more time to work through.
Entry
– the entry step seeks to make reliable contact with the other person, set a notional agenda for mutual attention and make the first move into the action step; it establishes the imagined interaction's purpose, process and outcome.

1. their personal (in)congruence:
   X had been talking about his childhood abuse by a family friend in a calm and fluent manner with lots of detail about time, place and action. We'd been working around his anger and overpowering anxieties for some weeks when this story came up. It was almost scripted. Subsequently it turned out he'd told the story to other therapists and a psychiatrist without the feeling of the event getting through, nor being asked for.

After few minutes I said:

I'm not sure where you're going with this, why it's important to you…your expression is a bit blank but the story is a major trauma. Can you tell me what you're feeling now?

Check* - Does it feel right to look into this now?
Action – action is where the work proposed in the entry gets done, or at least attempted;
to continue this example:

1. (mis)understanding of "the facts"
   X identifies a little distress after telling the story because he's not too sure if what he said is true, if it really happened exactly as he said…maybe even it didn't really happen?? No one else who knew it happened has talked about it– not his grandmother, nor his parents, even to this day 30+ years later. (This family silence becomes the near source of his continuing trauma, the engine of repeated doubt and anxiety of catastrophic proportions.)

So I said,

No, you're wrong about that. Memory works like this…. Memory is never perfect. In addition, your difficulty with the fact of memory's fallibility is magnified by your family rule against exploring it, which among other things may makes you feel it is wrong of you to want to clarify the memories….we've talked about your parents active resistance to such exploration often over the last months….

Check* - Is this matter clearer than it was at the start?

Close
– is when a clear end to the action is achieved, for the moment. Possibly a new entry is proposed either immediately or at some specific time / place in the future. Doing so provides continuity and, more important, evidence of commitment to the relationship (appearing above as "positive intent").
Finally X said,

1. the beliefs (including values) through which they interpret the world –
   Yes, it's clearer and I think I now see that expecting perfect facts is one way I hold myself to ransom with my fallibility and guilt…it's hard to see clearly, but that abuse was not my fault...I'm caught in a system of denial…

And I replied,

So maybe we can look more deeply at how that system is spread throughout your life, not just your family of origin…

Check* - Is what we've done so far moving in the direction(s) you want, need…?


There's a start on telling people things they may not want to hear. There's a host of fine points for different situations, vulnerabilities and relationship statuses. You may have noticed that Checking could have the result of stopping a step in its tracks and forcing a return to the previous one. That's the price of effective communication. Knowing that itself can help bridge steps which feel like they are moving back more often than forward. I've been working with X about this for 18 months.
Maybe next round I'll provide a few extended vignettes of confrontations which have been extremely high volatility and also resonating effectiveness for their participants…both me and them.

*Checking is a sub-step throughout usually made by the therapist to ensure a good fit of process and content is maintained. Patients can be expected over time to provide checking themselves, too. It should prevent misunderstandings or misinterpretations, and consequently reduce unintended deceptions both ways. For each of the three domains of confrontation ask things like:

(a) their personal (in)congruence,- How does this feel to you now? How's your breathing, tightness now?

(b) (mis)understanding of "the facts" - Is this matter clearer than it was at the start? What do you see as the key facts in your struggle now?

(c) the beliefs (including values) through which they interpret the world - Is what we're doing now moving in the direction(s) you want, need…?

 

 

Learning to act right (29)… I did see something, really!!

Learning to act right (29)… I did see something, really!!
Torrey Orton
Aug. 23, 2012

How close are the nuts to cracking?

Six weeks ago I wrote: "I did not see anything I could swear to in a court of law" about a missing, believed to be stolen, cross out front of the Fertility Control Clinic.


A few days ago the following happened on the same stage: The police were called for an act of mine deemed assaultive by two of the regular Saturday HoGPIs. I had held up in the view of them and their associates the front of THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIANMAGAZINE August 04-05, 2012. The cover story was a self-outing by a Catholic priest of his married status while an active pastor. Its title was: "Sins of the Father - Why this Catholic priest got married – and kept it secret from his flock".


While holding it up, I also mentioned that there was another front page story in TheAGE that day of yet another unreported sex abuse by priests in the 1990's. This presentation took about 10 seconds, twice. Once to show it to a group of 3 HoGPIs gathered at one end of their prescribed protest ground and the second time to the lone male at the other end of their ground. He said something at the time about calling the police, and he did so, but did not specify what prompted the call. He was more than his usual angry self at my perceived disrespect for their enterprise.


A two officer divvy van showed up from the nearest station about 30 minutes later. One male, one female in their early thirties. The woman conducted the formal discussion with the complainants and then came over to see me, which was the moment I discovered I was the object of their complaint. I acknowledged having the allegedly offensive magazine and that I raised it in front of them, along with a remark about the morning's front page revelations in TheAGE of 18/08/12 about priestly misbehaviour with children. Such news seems to me germane, since the HoGPIs are claiming an absolute high moral ground for their objection to abortion. For me, their ground loses some altitude in the light of the Church's failing, so I have been making this point regularly over months, but not so effectively it seems.


Their reported complaint was that I had provoked them by raising matters that were not germane to their self-appointed task of "helping" patients at the FCC. Hence, I had assaulted the complainants. Of course, it is a bit of a wonder that something un-germane should have been so provoking, but then I quibble. I offered not to do it again. I was not commanded not to, nor formally cautioned against doing so. The door is open to argue that it is germane, and that might well be worth doing sometime if we have some cheap legal service with which to pursue the issue and make the total behaviour of the Church germane to this part of their suite of offers to the local world!!?


One side effect, so I'm told, has been to have my image raised in the FCC security community for having lived down a "we'll call the police" threat from the HoGPIs. Didn't even know I was lifting my profile. Since I didn't know what I was doing, I can hardly claim any honour for it. Maybe effectiveness is more important than intentions. It's often unclear how many things come to be.











 

Learning to act right (19)… When being needy is good for others!

Learning to act right (19)… When being needy is good for others!
Torrey Orton
July 17, 2011


S. is a fixer and a guilt artist, with shame toppings if possible. Fixing things for others, preferably without much recognition, is his primary means of justifying his otherwise (in his view) unworthy self. The joy of fixing a lot is never enough, however, to compensate the wrongs he has done in the process of trying to right things…even worse when the fix itself fails, too, as it did recently. You may recognise yourselves in this caricature somewhere.


So what to do when we are unwell, injured, beset by bad karma – especially the ones which challenge others' empathy or compassion, the ones in the extremes of life like prospectively terminal illnesses / injuries, committing or being victims of incarcerateable offenses, betrayals real or imagined, etc.? If we are reasonably well befriended, some of them will rush to palliate or placate the injuries.


Others will duck and run or just not be seen when they realise they've never experienced your bad luck before or it's their own bad dream. In either case, about then helplessness sets in. What can I do for you, they may ask, and you may say, literally, nothing, thinking what right do I have to ask for help, especially if I'm partly the author of my own condition?


But the friend needs your help to feel worthy themselves!! A fixer's catch 22: need to help my helpless friends, but not to help myself if helping them means helping them to help me!! In my most recent encounter with this dilemma I think I convinced the fixer, S. above, to accept that he had to bear the taint of a little help sticking to him from the virtuous action of his helping others know what to do so they did not feel helpless. There was additional pain for him, but not enough to compensate for the self-indulgence, of identifying what he really needs help with/for!


Of, course, sometimes the friends are helpless and that's for sure. They cannot undo the damage you have suffered, or you theirs. Then the fixer's in real trouble because the only solace for friends' helplessness is that painful truth. Herein's another story – the virtue of painful truths expounded rather than withheld. Doubly difficult for the fixer, but way too hard for many leaders.

I digress.

Learning to act right (16)… “sounding a bit stupid”

Learning to act right (16)… "sounding a bit stupid"


Torrey Orton
Nov 15, 2010


If you've only got a hammer everything looks like a nail, and if it doesn't you treat it as one! Some ethical matters are invisible to us until we see them right. Without right seeing, right action is improbable. With right seeing right action is only possible. Sources of learning to see things rightly, as they are, unvarnished by preconception and prejudice, has been the heart of epistemology since Plato looked out of his cave and saw the light. In ethics, as much as science or art, the problem is that we can't easily see what we don't already know. This is not only a theoretical problem.


A good sign that someone is seeing anew, differently, as if for the first time, is the feeling of "sounding a bit stupid", as with my colleague below. So he earned an unexpected, and unintended, place in these annals and accepted the offer of a shift of domain with grace… a sign of potential for seeing anew. He was responding to an earlier post of mine on euthanasia and included the thinking breakthrough which opened the door to my views.


Hi, I think I run the risk of sounding a bit stupid with this, but here goes:

A few years ago I liked to play a game on my blackberry called "brickbreaker". It's a small version of a paddle/ball game. My high scores were typically around 8 to 10,000 points, and I never finished the series of challenges in the game.


Then one day, at Oslo airport, I started to think about what the purpose of the game was. For me, I was looking for the stripped back heart of the problem, a Zen approach if you like. What I realised was that the most basic aim of the game was to ensure I hit the ball with the paddle as often as possible; not to earn points, or to hit "bricks". In fact, those things were distractions. They almost took away from the game.


From that point I simply focused on that one aim, and, surprise surprise, I discovered that not only was the game a series of challenges that created a loop (ie, once a player finished level 33, the game went back to level 1 with the score intact) but that the high score was, in fact, without limit. From a high score of, at best, 10,000 points, I went on to give up and retire on 1,450,000, having worked through the series of challenges hundreds of times.


All through thinking about the game differently.


And that's what I love about your approach. When you strip back everything, why should choosing to end a life with dignity be a crime? Suicide is a crime, as is attempted suicide, I think. You take away religion and government, strip it right back, but you include personal responsibility to friends and family. It's such a clear assessment of the problem. The clearest I've read, and that's why I hope more people read it.


But you can't beat city hall, and you CERTAINLY can't beat God and those that believe in him/her. They have suckered us into believing that choosing death is wrong. But can they explain why it's wrong? It's an extension, in the Catholic Church at least, of the every sperm is sacred routine. If you ask why, it always comes back to God, and if god doesn't exist, they have a HUGE credibility problem.


There's a great scene in the old US series called Kung Fu, with David Carradine, where he is walking with a companion and they see a man about to jump off a bridge to his death. Caine's companion says "Shouldn't we save him" and Caine says "How can you know what he's experiencing, how can you say that death may not be the best thing for him" or words to that effect.


Any anti euthanas-ist who has ever taken a pain killer should be ashamed of themselves.

Learning to act right (17)… Matters of love

Learning to act right (17)… Matters of love


Torrey Orton
Nov 8, 2010



Matters of love provide daily opportunities for practicing ethical behaviour. Intimate relationships are among our most desired and needed life foundations. In and through them we achieve or seek a large range of other needs. Wherever modernity passes, these relationships are endangered by powerful internal and external forces.


So, 1/2 marriages will have the experience of total relationship breakdown and starting over again (or not – also a decision). This involves, among other things, a delicate dance of hope and pragmatism played out to the music of our needs asserted and acknowledged, engaged and resisted – all for a good reason: no one other can wholly meet our needs. That doesn't stop us hoping they will! This hope is fuelled by the process of negotiating the unequal quantities of dominance and submission required to construct a workable whole for both parties – this thing called an intimate relationship.


The story below catches many of the conflicting needs that pave the way to relationship development and sustainability, or not. It is the effort that offers the learning for us. The honesty of the description provides the material.


Learning to do the right thing: Matters of love
I met my husband when I went to university at the age of 17. With all the enthusiasm of the young we had sex, fell in love, lived together, got engaged and at 22 I was married. This was a marriage based on sex and good food. We had nothing else in common and at the age of 27 with a 2 year old and a 6 week old baby I found myself a single mother. For the past 25 years my life has consisted of work, study and raising children. Early in my single life I had thought I could find love but I was bitter, angry, and distrustful - not attractive features.


So at 52 I fell in love. I had known this man for a number of years through my work. We met on occasion for breakfast and to talk work and usually ended up talking of all manner of things. Though the relationship had always been professional the rapport was comfortable. Then he asked me to dinner. His invitation and insistence told me this was more than a professional rendezvous. The dinner went for 4½
hours. When I think back to that night all I can remember is him and me, I have no recollection of anything else in the restaurant. The conversation was easy and varied and none work related. Here was an intelligent, attractive man who was interested in me at all levels.


I knew he was married, but I let myself believe his marriage was over and that all he needed to do was "sort out the logistics". How SMS and e-mail has changed the face of romance. What in the past took weeks of furtive phone calls and dates to say seems to be said in days. Things that you would never say out loud can be typed and sent with ease. It was exciting and sexually arousing in a way that I had never experienced.


Then the relationship moved to the physical. How nervous do you think I was? The last time I had a lover I was in my early 40s and though fit and healthy things are not where they used to be. I know love is just a cocktail of hormones that combine to make you form an attachment, but I will always remember how caring and considerate he was of me. I don't believe any man has treated me with such respect or tenderness.


Through all the excitement of the past weeks sitting heavily in the back of my mind has been his wife. When I separated, my husband had had an affair with his secretary and for years I have been able to say "he left me for the secretary"; he was the wrong doer, which gave me a sense of righteousness. In fact, we divorced because we had a bad marriage that made neither of us happy. We communicated on the most basic level, had differing values and life expectations. We used sex as a bargaining tool. My life is richer and happier for not being married to my ex- husband and my children more enlightened and happy people.


I find a man I feel worthy to love and who I think could love me and he is married. I have never wanted to be the other woman, partly because of my own experience but also I believe women shouldn't do that to other women. I could continue to have an illicit affair ignoring the consequences to his family, and my own dignity to satisfy a lost need for intimacy but I know it is not right. I don't want to be the cause of his wife's heartache and I want a relationship that is open, honest and conducted in the open light of day. I want him make the right decision about his marriage because he is unhappy, not because of me. I have been conflicted because I am 52, and it has taken me 25 years to fall in love again; will I miss an opportunity that may never occur for me again and end up a lonely old cat woman. Is it right to do what I know is wrong in the pursuit of intimacy long forgotten. I know it is not.


Here is the rub! I fall in love with a man battling the same dilemma. He wants to do the right thing and while I struggle with my own impasse, he has the courage to articulate what is right thing to do and I know he is right. So he is going to sort out his "shit", whatever that means. I don't know what I am expected to do. Will I wait? Does he want me to wait? Will I try to find love on the internet now I have experienced it and will I lose this desperate feeling knowing the right decision has been made?


Today I wish I could be unethical with ease but I know I won't respect myself. Any relationship we may have had will be doomed if it starts this way. That doesn't make me feel any better.


Note – the author remarked that it had taken about 40 minutes to write this story once she allowed herself to see she had a live ethical learning in her heart. The search for a topic had gone on for weeks til that moment.

Learning to act right (15)… Performance management up close

Learning to act right (15)… Performance management up close
Torrey Orton
Nov 3, 2010


Mick's Case – unavoidably conflicted retrenchment


It's easy these days to find stories of corporate malfeasance on large and small scales. So the world of business, which some think is outside the realm of ethics, is one rife with ethical challenges and short on ethical exemplars. The following is one candidate for exemplar status. Its power resides partly in the persistence of the main agent, Mick, and partly in the unavoidable complexity of the situation – performance management.


One meaning of an 'unavoidable complexity' is that there is no exit without carrying some of the dirt on you, as much inside as out. One reason there are few public examples is that ethical people tend also to be self-deprecating and so their stories remain only in the hearts and minds of those directly affected. Is it unethical to promote one's ethicality?! How could others learn from them?


Context - based on discussion June, 2003

 In 2003 Mick was opening a new franchise in an established retail / wholesale field. He had six months to reach break-even, and with an upward trend in place towards profitability. The current figures were promising. If successful, the franchisor would hand him a number of other opportunities on a platter. If unsuccessful, he would lose money, face and a future. He had been recently retrenched from corporate life himself and did not want to return to it. This was a very small business. That means all and every aspect is directly managed by the owner(s), especially difficult people issues like the following. No HR department, legal staff, salaries clerks, etc.


The small initial staff was handpicked for sales competence. One of them, Jean, was a mid-40's woman with background in the industry and track record in retail. However, over the first 6 weeks of operation, she had become less and less effective in converting prospects to sales. She paid too much attention to details of customers' product selection, disregarded prospects with much greater sales potential and was unpredictable in work attendance. Other staff, especially Mick's number two Jim, were beginning to remark Jean's short-comings, including her impact on sales. Mick was feeling the heat of both his own perceptions of her and Jim's emerging perceptions of his management competence. Jim had some stake in the outcome because equity participation for him was just around the corner of their passing the start-up test.


Jean appeared to have some personal issues which affected her work. Her children were in Perth and she was palpably uncertain and anxious in her dealings with people at work – staff and customers. Mick sensed she was in a fragile state. However, so was the business. Mick himself had recent experience of "Stalinist" management in large enterprises and very much saw himself as an opponent of that style. It was a very painful situation for him to appear "Stalinist", especially to himself.

Action

Nevertheless, Mick felt he had to let Jean go. A replacement had been found and was scheduled to start Saturday. Mick decided to retrench Jean on Friday. This was in keeping with the 3 month trial period of her employment contract. The payout was generous from the contract's viewpoint. His approach was to hand Jean her retrenchment notification and benefits at the close of business that day. He acknowledged her contribution so far and pointed out the reasons for retrenchment and expressed his concern at having to take this action.


Mick is troubled, still. First, he is aware that any retrenchment is violent for the retrenched. Second, he wonders if this one may not have been extremely violent from Jean's viewpoint considering her overall fragility - maybe a last straw kind of situation? Third, he wondered about his own contribution to this situation: did he make a hiring mistake in the first instance which exposed her to challenges she couldn't meet in her current condition? And, fourth, he didn't want to see himself as someone who does violence to others, though he knows that the viability of the business required it at that time.


July 25, 2010 email from Mick about my treatment of his work above


You give me too much credit. The replacement was organized in the background. I also had to balance up the supplier angle as they had a hand in finding Jean. And, yes, we did let her go. She was NOT up to the task. She should not have been there in the first place and the longer the situation went on the more it reflected on the total organization. I would like to think she was treated as well as could be done; but Torrey it was still a brutal act. Such acts occur when you take the time to "look and respect" staff. Whether or not they can do the job is an overlay on top of this.

As an addendum we had another one in the last 12 months. Greg – mid 50's, working in a small goods factory after he had been retrenched from a shipping company some years ago. His current employer was relocating to the other side of the city. He was looking for another job and he was recommended to us by a supplier (who we later found out had a relationship with Greg's daughter).


We sent Greg on a course – investment $4K. He appeared slow so we gave him more time. We spent time in explaining things we had gone over a number of times previously. He was not up to it so we set a deadline of 3 weeks and if no progress was made he would leave. After 3 weeks he had to leave. His performance was noted by customers and staff. I spoke to him at lunchtime and he left with a cheque straight away.


I later found out that that very morning he had refinanced his house. Knowing this, would we have done anything differently? NO.

 

Appreciation (28) … taking care and giving care challenges

Appreciation (28) … taking care and giving care challenges
Torrey Orton
Sept.27, 2010



To my co-workers in psychotherapy:


I noticed recently that caring is an important core part of therapy…not because I had not been being caring. The research on therapeutic effectiveness shows a 30% contribution from the therapeutic relationship alone, regardless of therapeutic paradigm or technique(s). The core of effective relationship is perceived care, arising from relevant therapist attention, interest, etc. 'Relevant' means felt by clients as directed accurately towards their needs at the moment.


Certainly I vary / waiver in my caring at times, but underneath all is unconditional positive regard as I understand it. My patients should feel, not always at the same moment, that I am caring about them and taking care of them. They need both to be taken care of adequately. If my care taking is not felt as caring, as specific to them and personal, it will not work in therapy.


If you have not been in therapy, you may have experienced care-taking from personal trainers, nurses, doctors, and other health providers which felt careless in the personal regard sense – as emerging from an automaton, or worse, someone who really doesn't like being with you. The effect may be to make you doubt the technical quality of the service provided, and that may inhibit its effectiveness, even if declared to be 'best practice', best of class, or similar marketised appreciations.


Unmarked detour: I did not expect to come to the following observation here but this is how writing goes. It is already noticed in Australia that the increase in non-native English speakers in aged care and some standard nursing is leading to a decline in perceived care because some care givers cannot communicate adequately with their patients. Similar is sometimes noted in general practice, and certainly the written competence of some NESB* medical practitioners is well below local high school graduation level.


This is not to impugn the intentions of care-givers. Rather it is to highlight that care – given and received – is expressed and expected differently in different cultures. Learning these differences and being able to produce them naturally is often a more than one generation's efforts away from an immigrant. The first level of that learning is linguistic, but not sufficient by itself. Many NESB immigrant groups in Australia have long had aged care facilities for own community patients for this reason.


Back on the road again. Herein lies a primary psychotherapeutic boundary issue – that taking care and caring seem inextricably intertwined. Taking care is analytically separable from the personal connection of caring / being cared for, but for the patient it is not. Nor is it separable for therapists, though efforts to do so by adopting certain distancing attitudes to patients suggest it can be. Care taking feels like it is caring, lacking which it feels mechanical (you're giving me a treatment rather than treating me) or experimental (you are using me / seeing me as an object of study). Even behavioural interventions for eating disorders, panic, phobias, etc., require a caring relationship to be effective because patient motivation is the key variable in interventions aimed to bring certain behaviours like binges under control.


People in treatment for such visibly behavioural troubles are there precisely because their self-control has fallen into the hands of a destructive habit. Habits are behavioural recipes for achieving aims without thought. They systematically solve recurrent problems with systemically repeatable solutions. They embody recurrent motivations (energy to achieve needs / wants). Motivation, in turn, stands on the back of self-confidence, self-worth, self-efficacy – all products of appropriate developmental challenges and relevant, timely appreciation by others, parents first among them. The therapist's task is to rehabilitate the injured selves. The first step is care for the patients. Doing so both suggests more or less explicitly that the patient is worth rehabilitating and that they have some of what's required already in them – their worthiness!


The danger of care, however, is its personal character and the potential for it to feel or be extended outside the therapy space and time. The boundaries for constraining care to the spacetime of therapy may constrain it out of reach for some clients…that such boundaries are needed is certain, but how they should be configured is a case by case, and often moment by moment, therapeutic task. Their importance is reflected in the articulation of professional guidelines for boundary construction and typical dangers of shoddy construction. Breaching some of these is a matter for de-registration. Case by case, moment by moment caretaking is delicate work.

Linguistic note: we speak of care givers and caretakers as if they were the same thing, though 'caretaker' has a more manorial, landed sense to it, while in ordinary usage 'care givers' are workers in respite or aged care country. How did those two usually opposed verbs come to signify the same action? Perhaps, the 'take' suggests a focus on the worker, an attitude necessary to effective care giving; the 'give' focuses on the receiver – the patient or client.

*NESB – non-english-speaking background

Learning to act right (10)…. Doing little goods badly

Learning to act right (10)…. Doing little goods badly
Torrey Orton
June 1, 2010 - Cauterets, France


Little goods may be great for others, for a moment
A guy is sitting back against a building with a hat turned up next to a small, handwritten plea for our consideration…$10 for a ticket to Frankston, $50 for a return to grandma in Warrnambool, anything for a meal… He's roughly dressed and generally unkempt, with spare clothes and potential bedding behind him. The right action(s) in such situations are thoroughly clear, and have been since the beginning of recorded reflections on acting right. These have always commanded giving to those less fortunate. Only late in human history have we arrived at societies which discourage caring for those in various perils. I'm perhaps somewhat afflicted with such thinking. I don't know. I do things like this:


I was coming out of the DHS building in Lonsdale Street a few weeks ago when my eye caught that of a panhandler* standing by the entry. He moved slightly towards me, at once saying "have ya got a dollar" as I glided nervously beyond reach, though I had a hand in my change pocket reaching for a gift which in mid-fingering I decided against and continued down the street. Just describing this is very difficult. What really happened? What did I /he actually do if we had a three camera video of the event to discover it from?


We haven't got such a record, but I know I went on down the street as he said "I only need $4 to get a …." (something inaudible). I headed off, pursued by my shame at having turned away from our visual engagement, to check out a camera at a place recommended by a friend. And fifteen minutes later I was headed back the same way with new camera in backpack and hand in pocket searching out the four dollars to give to the guy who I'd walked away from… thinking as I went up the street to the train to find him and make good my failed first response...taking out the loose change and separating $4 into my right hand held ready for giving … and not finding him where last seen and so wandering back across the street towards the train station holding the change still in hand for giving…by that time willing to give to any likely needy person to make good my lack of doing good when and for whom it was first needed … and therefore the more deserving in some way, I agreed with myself… and along some 20 seconds later he came, another gifting candidate, as I approached the crossing meters away from the train entrance, stopping for the light to change and, as with his precursor, catching an eye and receiving a request to which I responded with the prepared hand held backwards towards him as I crossed refusing to acknowledge (so it felt) his thanks or his look, disappeared into the station.


Protecting my professional distance?
Is my problem how to assess need on sight: what global personal look means what need, and comparatively which look is more needy at any time? And what's the individual's and what's the social responsibility for their need, and what are the mixes between them? These are useful reflections but perhaps not the central ones underlying my initial disengaging moves.


Rather my avoidant moves above may arise out of my need to protect my professional distance. This goes naturally with the therapeutic territory for me, though requires constant monitoring to reach and sustain the right level(s) for each relationship. The maintenance is usually done more or less explicitly with each client, and we both understand that it has to be there. Levels below that lie my relatively distant relationship style, too. An unscripted and spontaneous encounter with a needy other torsions both my professional and private selves.


There are other aspects. These come into view in the following events.


On a street corner in Pau, France. We were on the way to a week in the Pyrenees and an immediate lunch which was expected to be and turned out to be worth the travel for. I saw the guy (a French instance of the beggar in the first paragraph above – almost a clochard) 10 meters ahead and reached in my change pocket to pull out a 1Euro coin by touch and got a 2 instead, which I handed over to profuse thanks in mildly religious language. On reflection about this event I realised that part of my halting approach to giving in public is being in public, being seen to give…an apprehension which I can't yet source itself. At least now I know it's there in the feeling of the act. A vulnerability driving my distance?


Who deserves a gift?
Maybe there's an element of doubt about who's most deserving, or how much deserving, which is brought prominently into my awareness by the publicity and variety of opportunity for a perceived misallocation, a kind of performance anxiety which might afflict me at anytime where the decision I'm making is relatively uncertain for me. Hence the importance of automatic ethical responses to our ethical effectiveness?? …to our making a decision rather than none (also a decision of course, but..)?


What good will it do anyway?
And there's the question of gift effectiveness. One friend handles this with the rule that when approached he will give whatever is claimed to be needed – e.g. $50 last week on the other's promise it was required to make a certain practical change which would liberate him from certain difficulties. There's no follow-up or follow through to validate the method. But, it is a method with more than madness since the problems of authentication of need and outcomes to giving are such as to require bringing the other into the family or a relationship of long term friend to support it... and then giving becomes an adoption! Perhaps that's a feared (while wholly unlikely!) effect for me, too.


Underneath this concern is an objective social one about what makes good lives and how can we increase the number of us leading them. The distance some of us are from any reasonable notion of good life is obvious – often for unavoidably visible reasons which invoke the notional danger of "othering" (see Lyn Bender's nice review of these challenges here). The visible reasons -liked poverty, disability… - are accompanied by less visible incapacities of all kinds (hidden injuries of class, family history, etc.) which are not going to be repaired or often even vaguely ameliorated by a little good giving.


Guaranteed continuous giving strategy
Another acquaintance adopted the strategy of guaranteed continuous giving to the same needy person she encountered daily on the way to work, and no giving to others in need on the same trip. This approach was a partial fiscal adoption. It went on at a rate of $15 a day for some years. My acquaintance noticed the person had not been around for a while and eventually ran into her looking a whole lot better. She asked what the other had done with the daily gift and heard that it had provided a foundation on which to build a new life and kept her child in school because she was settled enough to ensure daily attendance.


Counterpoint: the accordionist with recorded accompaniment on a Paris Metro. I felt trapped on his arrival, knowing that an unavoidable request for money was coming, so was ill-disposed towards him before he started. More commercial versions of this tactic are the wandering musicians or their candid photographer colleagues in certain types of restaurants.


Trapped and relieved
His play was actually notably good with a suitable selection of tunes for an enclosed space and an unintended audience. A few others were tapping to the beat, and I resisted with effort myself, knowing the movement would be a tell for a prize I wasn't offering at the moment. When he stopped and came around with a worn cup one of my co-riders noted that he was better than average and that all wandering players were actually field tested for quality by the authorities. This moved me to reconsider and I drew out a 2 Euro coin and offered it to warm thanks (the average offer seemed less than a Euro).


Shame and giving
Looking back, I imagine that some of the size of my offer was compensation (self-punishment?) for my initial recalcitrance / reluctance to engage. Only I knew this thinking at the time, so the negotiation was entirely internal, except as it was infected with the potential shame(s) of my public exposure for so thinking. This is perhaps the other within me, a companion and competitor ever present to my daily activities. My other is often most present when real others are present, eliciting one facet or another of my being in the world.


I'm guessing now that I will try to work on doing little goods less conflictedly. Then I might see more clearly what mixture of thought/feeling is really occurring and build thereon a more effective contribution to decreasing the numbers and varieties of challenging others for me and them. I have to clarify my otherness to get there. I know for sure there are some others I do not want to be (nor could I be) and for these the struggle is political. For example, there's a shift of view in OECD and US policy thinking (Krugman) towards making the unemployed responsible for their joblessness by cutting off benefits. This raises once again an underlying individualist mantra – you are responsible for your fate, even if you are not!! But the policy argument is fiscal.


For me the struggle is to engage personally, which could include policy struggle but cannot be achieved by that alone.




*Not really such; we don't have a word I can find for a reasonably presented, but slightly down, usually male person who's acting out of desperate need.